1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of application performance and availability monitoring and more particularly to configuration item status value analysis.
2. Description of the Related Art
Decades ago, application performance and availability related mostly to the complexity of an application and the capabilities of its host platform. In view of the simplicity of the relationship between performance and resource availability, enhanced application performance could arise only through more efficient or less complex application coding, or through an enhanced hosting platform including more memory, more caching resources, faster fixed storage, or speedier processing. As a result, until recently, little attention had been paid to the performance of an application as an indicator of anything more than merely an overly complex application, or an underpowered host platform.
The popularization of more complex, enterprise computing environments has resulted in new efforts to explore the relationship between the state of a host platform and the performance and availability of a hosted application. To further explore the changing states of applications deployed within the enterprise, application performance monitoring systems have been developed whose purpose is to detect an impending state change of a monitored application. In furtherance of its purpose, typical performance monitoring systems can be coupled to monitored applications and can monitor resources which affect the operation of the host platform. Importantly, these resources can include both hardware and software constructs.
Generally intended for use by network and application administrators, enterprise computing monitoring systems monitor selected elements in the network of components forming the enterprise computing environment. Enterprise computing monitoring systems are traditionally organized in a hierarchical fashion, with sensors distributed throughout the network of components forming the enterprise computing environment. These sensors relay monitored events to aggregation nodes, which in turn can relay the monitored events to a smaller set of aggregation nodes. Monitored events can be interpreted, translated and provided to interacting administrators in order to facilitate the management, performance and availability, of the enterprise computing environment.
In the modern, complex, heterogeneous enterprises it is often the case that a single resource, also referred to as a configuration item (CI), is known and monitored by more than a single monitoring system or function. This is particularly true when considering the computer system as a composite of individual components or CIs, for example an operating system, a database management system, a network card, disk storage and memory, each of which may be monitored by multiple monitoring systems. Each of the monitoring systems monitoring the CIs typically specializes in monitoring some particular aspect of that CI.
Notably, the individual monitoring results from all the monitoring systems, each embodied as a CI status, can be useful and important when trying to understand the health or availability of a computing system. However, often it can be difficult to understand what information each monitoring system has attempted to convey to the end user in a CI status and how that information can be related to different information for the CI acquired from another concurrently monitoring system. Often the CI status from each of multiple monitoring systems can contradict each other, thus adding to the confusion and difficulty in interpreting and utilizing the information. Current solutions focus on aggregating the multiple CI status values into a single, composite value.
The aggregation of multiple CI status values tend to result in representing the resource status as the worst status reported by any monitoring system for the CI. In consequence, valuable information associated with individual CI status values for the resource will have been lost through the reconciliation of CI status values for the resource compiled by multiple different monitoring sources. By comparison, other less automated solutions require the end user to visually correlate CI status values from multiple monitoring systems. The latter solutions can be error prone and rely heavily upon the individual in understanding the information conveyed by each monitoring source.